Manual picking and packing of goods in a warehouse or storage area environment typically involves a human picker traversing a warehouse or similar storage area and selecting, by hand, the goods corresponding to entries in a list. This list is commonly known as a picklist, and as each good in the picklist is selected, the picker typically packs it away for shipment or processing. To increase the accuracy and efficiency of this manual picking and packing of goods, pick-to-light systems have been developed. Typical pick-to-light systems provide pickers with a visual cue as to the location of the storage container or storage subarea that contains the goods corresponding to the entries in the picklist. For example, some pick-to-light systems include lights attached to or positioned near each storage subarea (for example, a shelf or designated floor space) or storage container (for example, a bin or a crate) in the storage area. The lights provide a visual cue to the picker by illuminating or flashing if the corresponding storage subarea or storage container contains the goods in the picklist. Other pick-to-light systems include a light emitting diode (LED) display associated with a set of storage containers or storage subareas. The LED display is typically an alphanumeric display that provides a picker with the coordinates of the containers or subareas that contain the goods in the picklist.
Typical pick-to-light systems are limited in both flexibility and efficiency. First, typical pick-to-light systems tend to use fixed wiring to connect the lights or LED displays to their corresponding storage subareas or containers. The fixed wiring makes it difficult to rapidly change the location of goods in the storage area. For example, moving a set of crates from one location to another may require rewiring the lights associated with those crates or, alternatively, may require using entirely different lights and reprogramming the pick-to-light system accordingly. Second, typical pick-to-light systems tend to be ill-suited to support the simultaneous processing of multiple picklists in the same region of the warehouse. Typical systems may allow such simultaneous processing by introducing yet another cognitive step into the picking process. For example, different colored lights may be used for different picklists, but doing so forces a picker to identify not just which bin has an illuminated light near it but also requires that the picker further determine the color of the light and whether that color corresponds to his or her picklist. Introduction of this extra color determination cognitive step is undesirable in that it may lead to more errors and further decreases the accuracy of the manual picking process. The extremely high accuracy demands of manual picking and packing (for example, 99% accuracy) makes introduction of such an added margin of error undesirable.